


what about trust (it ended in disaster)

by murphysarc



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, monty & harper are mentioned like once, so is finn oops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 16:10:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11786709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murphysarc/pseuds/murphysarc
Summary: ‘whatever the hell we want’ was not supposed to look like this.or, an au in which murphy never escapes from the grounder camp in season 1, and instead, finds himself in cage after cage with no idea what freedom is supposed to mean. written through several instances in time, hoping to illuminate murphy’s psyche. title from “what about us” by pink.for blueparacosm, for all that she does, and all that she is <3





	what about trust (it ended in disaster)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blueparacosm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/gifts).



> WOW so, i wrote this for blueparacosm bc without her i probably wouldn't keep writing murphy fics?? i was super nervous writing for this fandom i hadn't written for before, especially with a character that isn't super popular in fandom, but she always leaves the nicest comments and!! not to mention is an amazing writer herself so pls go read all her stuff!! it's out of this world
> 
> for the record, i asked what she wanted in a fic and she said murphy doing anything. so. angst happened? <3

**i.**

“We should have killed him.”

Bellamy may have said the words, but Murphy knows they are hollow. They mean nothing to either of them, except for the simple truth that Bellamy equates Charlotte to Octavia and can’t shake the feeling he let his little sister die.

Clarke matches his steps in silence. “We did,” she says. Her tone is even, flat. “He’s as good as dead.”

Neither of them know that Murphy’s been following them all the way back to camp, hiding behind trees, keeping in their shadows. His fingers dance along the edge of the weapon Finn threw him. It’s an act of kindness he doesn’t understand, but won’t fight.

He watches them get closer and closer to camp, without a plan, only with the vague hope that Bellamy might realize Murphy’s _innocent_ , that Charlotte was a murderer, that he’s killed the one person who always had his back. Clarke, he knows, is too cold and detached to save his life but Bellamy, well…

_His fingers find hold in the messy, raven hair, his teeth biting Bellamy’s lower lip, a small gasp of air the only sound he can hear besides the downpour of the rain –_

Murphy shakes the memory. It does no good to think about what could have been.

“We still should have,” Bellamy says. “Now, he could come back.”

“What’s one man going to do?” Clarke argues, but that’s where she’s wrong, because he’s no man. He’s a young boy, an innocent boy, but they were willing to hang him anyway.

The hope that Bellamy will change his mind still lives within him. He decides to stop following them in fear that it will be snuffed out.

 

**ii.**

He doesn’t know how he got here, but there is a cage with a locked door, and he is inside it.

It’s been built from scratch, but it’s sturdy, ready to withstand the end of the world for a second time over. It must be – Murphy’s been screaming and throwing his weight at the door for hours now, to no avail.

He’s trapped. He’s not going to get out easily.

Somewhere, somehow, he remembers aimless walking, desperate attempts at hunting, and then a hand covering his mouth and nose and then –

Here he is.

 

**iii.**

_“Whatever the hell we want!” Bellamy yells. His fist reaches up, reaching a place higher than the sky, a place Murphy wishes he was tall enough to see._

_‘Whatever the hell we want’ is not supposed to look like this._

**iv.**

His new best Grounder friend comes to torture him a few times a day. Very quickly, they figure out he can’t speak Grounder and his torturer speaks to him in choppy, broken English.

“Tell me,” he growls, ripping another fingernail off, deaf to Murphy’s hideous screams.

“I can’t,” Murphy will sob, desperate to escape to another place, looking up in the sky to try and figure out what Bellamy sees up there that’s so good.

“How many warriors? How many weapons? Medicine? Walls?”

“I _can’t_!”

He can’t, because he still has hope that Bellamy will bound into the clearing, kill the Grounder and rip the cage open. All the edges in Murphy’s life will dull and he will finally be soft, everything will be soft, as soft as curly raven hair is a day after it rains.

 

**v.**

Day one, it is easy to resist.

Day two, his vision of the future begins to shrink.

Day three, he knows he is alone.

 

**vi.**

_The dropship is about to leave, carrying one hundred problematic souls to the ground, maybe only because the Ark is tired of having to deal with them._

_Turbulence hits, and Murphy shakes in his seat, trying to hide the fear that is so obvious to him. If Mbege were here, it’d be different, but he’s all the way across the dropship, as if those in charge knew the two of them were not a pair to be messed with._

_Instead, a tall boy with raven hair and a guard’s uniform stands in front of him. A look of panic and guilt strikes his face. There’s something wrong about him being here, but Murphy doesn’t raise an alarm._

_Their eyes meet. The guard nods, eyes full of something Murphy has only heard of in the myths – hope._

**vii.**

“How many warriors?” Only a few trained.

“How many weapons?” Next to none.

“Medicine?” A doctor who barely knows what she’s doing.

“Walls?” Nothing you can’t break.

After all, it didn’t take long for Murphy to break.

 

**viii.**

His head swims. Time loses meaning. The rare times he is conscious, Murphy can’t tell where exactly he is.

They leave his cage open, one night, but he is so lost and dead to the world he doesn’t notice.

His best Grounder friend comes back the next day to find him still inside the cage, curled up, eyes wide but staring at nothing at all. “The door is open, but you stay inside,” the Grounder says, maniacally yet confused. “You stupid? Or you want to die?”

“Yes,” Murphy says.

 

**ix.**

His untreated wounds remain open and painful but the ones Bellamy inflicted still hurt the worst. When he stops, thinks too hard, his neck begins to pulse with a dull ache that will never die.

It is days, maybe weeks later when the Grounder camp is ransacked. Men in strange suits storm inside, throwing canisters of gas to knock out the Grounders. Some are killed. Some are loaded onto stretchers and taken away.

One of the men approach Murphy’s cage. Their eyes are hidden behind the suit but the voice is low, calculating, too cold to be much of a human. “This one’s still alive,” he says.

Another of the invaders approach. “Barely.”

“Barely is good enough.”

The other nods, entering Murphy’s cage, roughly picking him up and walking back to the center of the camp, placing him with the other Grounders to be captured.

He already knows he is going from a cage to another cage. He already knows that might be the best place for him.

He already knows nobody will come for him.

 

**x.**

_“We should have killed him–”_

_Murphy chooses this moment to emerge from the trees, hands on the weapon pointed towards Bellamy. “Oh, you should have, huh? Really?”_

_“Murphy!” Clarke yells, but he pushes her aside._

_“Yes,” Bellamy says._

_“Because of something like this?”_

_“Yes.”_

_In that moment, Murphy raises the weapon and stabs it right into Bellamy’s heart –_

_In that moment, Murphy drops the weapon and pulls Bellamy closer –_

_He doesn’t know which one he’d rather have, but neither of them are possible anymore, and he’s starting to believe that maybe he’s a little bit to blame._

**xi.**

The cages in Mount Weather are much smaller than his old one, so constricting, so tight, so inhumane that he starts to miss the Grounder camp.

The Ark, the dropship, camp, the Grounders, Mount Weather – they’re all glorified cages, anyway.

He stays locked up for a long, long time. Sometimes men come in and take away a Grounder at random, stringing them up and taking their blood. Murphy doesn’t understand it. He does know, though, that one day he’ll be strung up, hanging upside down, bled dry.

He’ll give them that, and then, he’ll be out of things to give.

That is, until they bring in Bellamy, kicking and screaming, and lock him in a cage right above Murphy.

It’s fate, he decides, that’s cruel.

 

**xii.**

“Murphy? How long have you been here?”

Silence.

“You…what the hell happened to you, Murphy?”

Silence.

“How long have you been here?”

Silence.

 

**xiii.**

Murphy understands freedom, now. He does. It’s a privilege, a right, something that you must _earn._ He has not earned it yet, so he will pay his dues until it is no longer necessary.

Only his captor can grant him the right. Before, it was his best Grounder friend. Now, it is some scientist at Mount Weather.

It is not Bellamy Blake – he hopes – and therefore, he owes him _nothing._

Murphy’s never owed him anything, but Bellamy has always been able to find a way to take whatever he can give.

Days pass before the silence breaks. “You didn’t come for me.”

“What?”

“I was taken to a Grounder camp and tortured, and you didn’t come for me.”

“I…I didn’t know where you were.”

“I thought, maybe, you would. I thought you cared enough, after…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Bellamy deserves to hear about their past encounters, the passion and drive that existed between them at one point in time, he deserves to regret about missed opportunities and chances they wanted to take –

Murphy, though. He may not deserve to be free, but he deserves better than having to relive the possibility of a future he always wanted.

 

**xiv.**

They harvest his bone marrow two days later, coincidentally, the same day the Skaikru invasion takes place.

The Grounders are freed, Bellamy is freed, but apparently there are still some of the hundred trapped down here, and so it continues all around them.

Murphy doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s too busy screaming his life away as the drills dig deeper, and deeper, and further…

Briefly, he loses himself, but when he wakes, there is an audience to witness his torture, chained to the wall and watching him with horrified expressions. Some, he recognizes, both from the camp and the Ark, but some he has never seen before.

They let him go, then, pushing him to the ground and chaining him to the wall next to a girl with a tight ponytail and too many scars in her eyes. “I don’t know you, do I?” she says. He shakes his head.

“Raven,” she says, quietly.

“Murphy.” His voice is hoarse from screaming. If he’s telling the truth, his whole body is both on fire and completely numb, but Murphy is not known for his honesty.

The name rings a bell in her head. “You’re the one they hanged.”

He nods. It’s not what he wants to be remembered for, but it’s better than nothing.

“You know,” she says. “Bellamy talks about you. He regrets it. I think he missed you.”

Clearly, Raven knows nothing.

 

**xv.**

He’s been freed from the Grounder camp. He’s been freed from Mount Weather.

Is this freedom? Is he done? Is the nightmare he’s been living finally over?

Murphy should know better than to think these sorts of things.

 

**xvi.**

“I’m so glad you’re finally back home,” Bellamy whispers, curling himself around Murphy, a display of the unsaid feelings.

He isn’t, though. What happened once will only happen again. In the middle of the night, he gets up from bed and leaves, following the path Clarke took only hours before.

He can’t stay in a place full of people who look at his neck and wince.

**xvii.**

The chain Ontari places around his neck is one final bit of irony that almost makes him laugh.

_He’s walking in the woods, more careful this time, but Ontari and her travelling band still catch him off guard._

_“I’m going to Polis,” she whispers, dragging the tip of her knife down his cheek. “And you’re far too pretty not to come with me.”_

_Murphy’s not the only one that she’s swiped off the road and stuffed in the back of her caravan on the way to Polis. Four others, two girls and two boys, sit next to him during the trip. They are all there for the same reason – pleasure._

_He gets it, he does, he_ has _to. Freedom is a privilege. One day, he’ll earn it._

**xviii.**

There are five of them in the back of Ontari’s caravan. Only Murphy makes it all the way to Polis.

 

**xix.**

Time accelerates whenever Ontari’s around. His mind brushes past the moments of her body on top of his, where she tightens his collar, pushes him past his fourth or fifth breaking point.

She’s his captor. She _owns_ him –

No –

That’s _not_ how it’s supposed to be. That’s not all he’s supposed to be.

It can’t be.

 

**xx.**

Clarke has never done anything for him, but he saves her life anyways. Bellamy comes up, afterwards, and wraps him in an embrace.

“You were here? All this time?” he whispers.

“I’m sorry,” Murphy says, and he means it, because he thinks he’s finally figured it out. Bellamy captured his heart a long, long time ago.

 

**xxi.**

He stays with Bellamy, and Clarke, and Raven, trying to help as best as he can. From all his time around Grounders, he’s fluent in Trigedasleng, but every instance the language leaves his mouth he feels wrong. Monty and Harper, two of the hundred Murphy remembers from before, stay with them as well, the only six who seem to want to prevent the end of the world.

He stays with them, especially because apparently, they only have six months to live until a second apocalypse wipes them all out again. That is not enough time for him to voice all he wishes Bellamy to hear, but it will have to do.

Raven, somehow, understands and lets him stay close to her while she works on creating nightblood. “You’ve seen some shit,” she says to him one day, seemingly out of the blue.

“Yeah.”

“I just mean – it’s kind of amazing that you decided to stick with us.”

“Yeah, I mean. Bellamy, I guess.”

She nods, doesn’t pressure him. It’s a nice change.

“You’re not so bad yourself, you know,” he says.

It doesn’t make sense, but it does. Raven smiles, the first time since ALIE left her to fend for herself.

 

**xxii.**

_“Whatever the hell we want!” Bellamy yells. His fist reaches up, grabbing hold of the sky and dragging it down, down, down…_

_That was the day the sky met the sea. That was the day Murphy’s churning, dark depths felt a little bit brighter._

**xxiii.**

“Hey, Clarke!”

The blonde turns to face him. If she’s surprised he called, she doesn’t let it show.

“I just want you to know that I forgive you, alright?”

Clarke’s expression remains unfazed. Somehow, though, Murphy knows she understands, possibly more than he does.

“Alright,” she says. “Thank you, Murphy.”

 

**xxiv.**

He thinks, maybe, this is freedom.

The lab could become home. It took them days to get here, without a boat to cross the lake, but now that he is here with Clarke, Raven, Bellamy, Monty and Harper, and they can be live there, they can be free.

He and Bellamy are far from official, far from anything, but they are not _nothing_.

“The lab isn’t radiation proof,” Raven announces one day, shattering everything Murphy thought he knew.

“Then we go to the bunker,” Clarke says, sighing. Ah, yes – the infamous bunker that Octavia won by competing in some duel.

“Not enough time,” Raven counters. “Without a boat, or a rover, it’ll take a week to get there on foot, and by then…”

“So what now?” Bellamy asks. Unconsciously, Murphy slides just a little closer to him.

“We go to space.”

This, he decides, is not freedom.

 

**xxv.**

The Ark is _definitely_ a glorified prison.

Never mind the fact that Clarke had to sacrifice her life for the rest of them to get here. Never mind the fact that they misjudged their entire situation, that the radiation came early, that they have no idea if the bunker actually _was_ sustainable.

But now, now that they are here, it takes all Murphy has not to revert to who he was in the Grounder cage, back when he still thought losing hope was something worth crying over.

“It’s just that I don’t know what I’m supposed to _do_ ,” he says to Bellamy, as Raven leaves to fix some machinery, while Monty and Harper go off to the algae farm.

“We just…live.”

“I’ve never done that before, I think.”

“We’re doing it right now, aren’t we?”

“I’m not free.”

Bellamy pauses, turning so he faces Murphy completely. “What do you mean?”

“It’s been a cage, and then a cage, and then another cage…I’ve never been free. Nobody’s ever let me be free. I don’t know what it _means_.”

“Oh, Murphy,” Bellamy sighs, grabbing him and pulling him into a tight embrace. “Nobody else gets to decide that for you.”

A pause. “Really?” It’s cold in space, but maybe he doesn’t have to be.

“Really. I promise, I’ll show you.”

Murphy guesses, then, that maybe his captor has always been himself.

**xxvi.**

_“Whatever the hell we want!” Bellamy yells, but it’s more of a reassurance to himself than a gesture of power._

_“Whatever the hell we want!” Murphy echoes. It is now he knows that the words are anything but hollow._

**Author's Note:**

> hahaha roman numerals don't look like numbers anymore yIKES
> 
> anyways thanks for the read!!! i hope you have a wonderful, loving day. <3 <3


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